Package-Aware Approach for Repository-Level Code Completion in Pharo

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Authors: Omar AbedelKader, Sté́phane Ducasse, Oleksandr Zaitsev, Romain Robbes, Guillermo Polito
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Pharo offers a sophisticated completion engine based on semantic heuristics, which coordinates specific fetchers within a lazy architecture. These heuristics can be recomposed to support various activities (e.g., live programming or history usage navigation). While this system is powerful, it does not account for the repository structure when suggesting global names such as class names, class variables, or global variables. As a result, it does not prioritize classes within the same package or project, treating all global names equally. In this paper, we present a new heuristic that addresses this limitation. Our approach searches variable names in a structured manner: it begins with the package of the requesting class, then expands to other packages within the same repository, and finally considers the global namespace. We describe the logic behind this heuristic and evaluate it against the default semantic heuristic and one that directly queries the global namespace. Preliminary results indicate that the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) improves, confirming that package-awareness completions deliver more accurate and relevant suggestions than the previous flat global approach.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Software Engineering Research Logic programming and type systems Software Engineering Techniques and Practices

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
9 January 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint